words, food, yoga and philosophical whimsy

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Where to start?

The fire in my belly from my last post has me frustrated. I’ve got all this energy, all this desire to do something, but no idea where to start.

My appetite has gone nuts. For a few days there it was almost at hyperactive thyroid level — the kind of eating not uncommon to me before I had my thyroid zapped. Just like back then, it’s a need to do something (eat) rather than an actual hunger. I mean, if I don’t eat, I get hungry, but the feeling itself is not like normal hunger. And, again, it’s a hunger that doesn’t know where to start. When I get like this I’ll eat just about anything. I’ll open the pantry and the fridge and just eat things as I come across them: yoghurt followed by sultanas, followed by dry crackers, followed by a spoonful of onion jam, followed by a handful of nuts, followed by whatever chocolate I can get my hands on, followed by an intense desire to cook porridge, and while that’s cooking I’ll eat some more nuts and some more jam and maybe some more crackers and definitely some more chocolate. Of course, when the porridge is cooked I feel like I’m going to explode. But I still want to eat. And so I eat the porridge.

I should clarify. One of the ‘benefits’ of having an overactive thyroid is the crazy-fast metabolism. Constant eating, no weight gain. Sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? Read back over that last paragraph, will you? It’s terrifying and exhausting. And kinda expensive.

Now that I don’t have a thyroid, and my thyroid levels come from a little white pill every morning, my metabolism, while still fast, is much more normal. Except when my brain goes into overdrive like it seems to have in the last few weeks. (The list above, while an accurate description of the appetite of someone experiencing thyrotoxicosis, is a little hyperbolic when used to describe my appetite now. Take a few things off the list. That’s about right.) It’s like my brain needs extra fuel.

Also fuelling my brain are the many, many journal articles, newspaper articles and books I’m reading, and the videos I’m watching and the radio programmes I’m listening to. I’m jamming (ha) them all in there, hoping that my brain is like my metabolism and can process them quickly.

The other thing I’ve found myself doing is taking up lots of new projects. House projects, mainly. Today a friend of mine came around for lunch and I convinced him that it’d be a great idea for him to drive me to Bunnings (I don’t have a car) so I could spend a voucher I had. I bought a lot. Almost the second his car was out of sight I had my (new) gardening gloves on and manically planted just about everything I’d bought, even though my plan had been to leave the planting until the weekend. Then scrubbed the dirt off my hands (I’d ditched the gloves to plant the smaller stuff) and rushed off to teach a yoga class.

Now that I think about it, I’m probably achieving more than I realise with this energy. But it sure doesn’t feel that way. And therein lies the problem, I think. A while ago, I wrote over at the Monday Project about how I’ve got lots of start-up energy, but struggle with follow-through. As well as just running out of steam, not getting the time to appreciate what I’m managing to get done means that I feel like I haven’t done anything, become disheartened and, often, give up.

Kinda like how your stomach takes about twenty minutes to process what you’ve just eaten, feel full, and tell you to stop eating. If you eat quickly you end up with that discreetly-undo-the-top-button-of-your-pants-full. Not good for you in the long run, and not overly pleasant at the time.

So, in the same way that you might, say, actually finish chewing and swallowing one mouthful before moving on to the next, I’m going to try to take a bit of time with some of the writing I’m working on and some of the ideas that are floating about in my head. It doesn’t need to be finished tomorrow. It does have a deadline, of course, but that deadline is a little way away yet.

Right now though, I’m going to go downstairs to see if there’s some chocolate in the cupboard.

~

In case you’re not familiar with the Monday Project, or missed the newest project theme because I’m a bit of a dill and accidentally scheduled it a week early, you can have a look at it here.